MARCH-APRIL 1981 Light Spot on the Display Unit
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WE MARCH-APRIL 1981 light spot on the display unit. be seen to locate a defect, a spe What's An orangewood stick is used cially designed fixture is used to as a pointer. The short then can flip the circuit board from one New be marked with an arrow stick side to the other. e r. To l o o k a t t h e d e f e c t m o r e Using the camera, 95 percent closely, the technician places the of the defects were repaired. The T h e N o r t h e r n I l l i n o i s Wo r k s h a s extension ring on the lens of the implementation of the infrared a new cost saving infrared cam camera and positions the camera camera system for diagnostic era system for locating defects in so that an area 1 '4 inches square testing realized a substantial circuit packs. around the problem area may be cost reduction savings during its The diagnostic testing system viewed. first year of use for semi-conduc consists of a camera, liquid ni If both sides of the board must tor store circuit packs alone. trogen to provide a stable base for temperature comparison and a cathode ray tube to display the image seen by the camera. Generally, there are four types of problem-causing shorts in cir cuit packs: defective compo nents, foreign debris, solder bridges and internal multi-layer board defects. Early data col lected with the new system indi cate that components are more .im \" \ i % M a r c u s O n a t e w i t h i n f r a r e d c a m e r a that provides color monitoring. Shorts show up as white spots. frequently defective than the b o a r d s t h e m s e l v e s . When a circuit pack is for warded for diagnostic testing, it is positioned in a fixture in front of the infrared camera, and pow er is applied. While monitoring the display and the power meters, the operating technician slowly increases current to the s h o r t e d c i r c u i t . T h i s c u r r e n t raises the temperature of the shorted area, which appears as a 2nd Issue 33rd Year Page 2 page VLSI What Very Large Scale Integration bodes for the future 8 Reaching The Top A Pittsburgh engineer takes on the Andes 12 VIRGOS B e l l S a l e s n e w e s t computer system 16 Molding The Corporate Logo The fine art of making Bell System logos 20 Let's All Sing LikeThe Birdies Sing A reprise of some old company songs 22 Benefits Quiz How much do you know about Plan revisions? 24 O u r N e w e s t H o m e t o w n A v i s i t t o t h e s i t e o f o u r n e w e s t Page 24 electronic components plant 28 Of Parking, Pools and People The history of a very successful carpool q'tnraii^rtia '' 30 Stager's Year: 1881 H d e c i s i o n d u e The man who engineered our entry into the Bell System G e o r g e G r a y P e t e r L e w i s O N T H E C O V E R : P r o c e s s c h e c k e r E d i t o r D e s i g n Western Electric Jacquie Younger and engineer Fran Saul Fingerman Leonard Stern Ehret examine VLSI chips under a M a n a g i n g E d i t o r P h o t o g r a p h y microscope in the MOS clean room Elizabeth Perlman Thomas J. O'Donoghue a t A l l e n t o w n W o r k s . O u r c o v e r |WE| is published for employees of A s s o c i a t e E d i t o r P r o d u c t i o n Western Electric. President; D.E.Procknow; story begins on page 2. Photo by Secretary: R.F.Ehinger; Copyright © 1981 by Western Electric Co., Inc. Len Stern. Treasurer: R.L.MeLaughlin. All Rights Reserved. Editorial office: 222 Broadway, NY, NY 10038 P r i n t e d i n t h e U n i t e d S t a t e s o f A m e r i c a . Telephone: (212) 669-2621 Title "WE" is a registered U.S. trademark. By Saul Fingerman In a real sense, Allentown has were beginning to realize there was been in a state of transition from no end in sight. From the outside, the Allentown its beginning. It went on-line in Works looks just like any other Today, we are well into VLSI. 1947, the same year the transistor We are making chips with over postwar Western Electric plant. w a s i n v e n t e d a t B e l l L a b s . I r o n i Girded on three sides by tree-lined 150,000 components, and there's cally, although its original purpose still no end in sight. In fact. Bell parking lots, its sprawling yellow- was to be a high-volume producer brick walls blend harmoniously Labs is already looking into the of vacuum tubes, it was Allentown into the peaceful Pennsylvania design of chips with over one mil and its people that introduced the lion components on them. landscape, and only the seasons transistor into mass production. seem to change. Inside, however, Even more impressive is the mas it's a different story. Those yellow- That was in 1951, but the real sive outpouring of creative intelli brick walls envelop startling impact of this new technology gence that led to all this. VLSI is, changes that represent a massive wasn't really felt until the 1960s after all, the creation of a small incursion into the future—changes w h e n i t w a s l e a r n e d h o w t o m a k e army of scientists and engineers, that are making Allentown unrec many transistors at one time on a many of them at Bell Labs and ognizable to many visitors. single piece of silicon, each tran We s t e r n E l e c t r i c . O n e s u c h i s B i l l The wide open spaces so charac sistor only a few thousandths of an Frankfort, Manager, Engineering teristic of Western Electric plants inch big. Like the vacuum tubes Silicon Integrated Circuits, at Al- These little chips are having a profound impact on the electronics industry VLSI are gone, filled in by enormous they superseded, the transistors Microphotograph of metal contact high-walled clean rooms whose could perform many vital elec strips on a 64K RAM. Each strip is eerie, yellow lights, white-gowned tronic functions. They could gen m u c h s m a l l e r t h a n a h u m a n h a i r. personnel and futuristic equipment erate a signal, or amplify it, or lentown. w o u l d m a k e i d e a l s e t s f o r s c i e n c e switch it on and off or store it as a F r a n k f o r t m a k e s i t c l e a r t h a t fiction movies. Equally redolent of bit of memory. VLSI was the result of evolutionary science fiction are the products be In time, it was learned how to rather than revolutionary pro ing made here. They are huge ag make equally minuscular capaci cesses. "There's no great clap of gregations of electronic circuitry, tors and resistors on silicon chips. thunder, and you're in a VLSI incredibly condensed onto tiny Now, many of these elements could world," he says. "You get here in chips of silicon not much larger be connected together to make orderly stages. You keep improving than an aspirin and considerably more complicated monolithic cir processes, decreasing feature sizes thinner. cuits—that is, complete circuits on and so on. No one single thing gives Fittingly enough, in this age of a single piece of silicon. These were you VLSI." acronyms, they are collectively the first true integrated circuits, Dinesh Mehta, Engineering Man known as VLSI, which stands for or ICs for short. ager, Metal Oxide Integrated Cir very large scale integration. In a On the average, every year since cuits, for Allentown, puts it more less technical vein, the letters could then, we have doubled the number succinctly: "We got here starting also stand for very large scale im of components per chip. By the with the transistor," he says, "and pact, for their effect on the Bell early 1970s, we were making chips it's been a long, hard road." System—indeed the world—is only with what people thought of as re Mehta's here is a good place to just beginning to be felt.